SAL Match 5 - Battersea - Race Report

Last match of the season and we needed a win to stay up in Div 2, hoping that our home track would have given us an extra push. However, competitiion was once more extremely tough and without some of our best athletes, we didn't get further than a fourth place. Back to Div 3 next year, but we have a solid base to build from, we will work to bounce back up straight away.

Our opponents for the day were City of Norwich, Havering AC and Medway&Maidstone.

City of Norwich was top of the league before this match and when their entire team showed up in a coach outnumbering us by a good margin, we could feel the pressure going up. And the other two clubs didn't spare anyone either...our team was solid and everyone who competed gave his/her best (many PBs and SBs recorded on the day), but we were missing some of our best fielders plus our juniors preferred to stay home, which is something that we cannot afford when competing against such strong clubs. 

Some example? In the men field competitions, only Tony MG with his PV managed not to be last in his string, whereas in the other field events we collected an impressive amount of four places, despite our scorers getting PBs and SBs all around. But it is not easy to win when somebody's hammer flies over 66m! The same happened in the women races from 100 to 1500m, where only our debutant Anne Eden had a good sprint finish and got a third place in the 1500m (and she was second in the 3000m B). Our only A string (yes, the only one!) win of the day was in the women steeplechase with Victoria B (who was also second in the 3000m A): we also got few B-string wins with Tolli H (Hammer), El O (2000m s/c), Simon B (5000m). Dani D (2000m s/c B), Jon B (5000 A and 1500 B), Dave R and Jaran F (110Hds and 400mHds), Inger B (110mHds B and PV B) and Caroline M (400mHds B) managed to come second in their events, which helped us to keep at close distance from M&M in third, although we didn't quite manage to close the gap by the end of the day. It was great to see some other new faces (Andrea F and Lee T) scoring with our team as well.

So, yes, we had easier days on the track! The final scores are:

  1. City of Norwich 254
  2. Havering AC 193.5
  3. Medway&Maidstone 173.5
  4. Serpentine 146

Massive thanks to our officials and helpers (too many to mention this time, but your contribution is always much appreciated), whose work was invaluable and contributed to our team score with 20 points. And to Daisy Gladstone for organising brilliantly the whole match: we got messages from all other clubs saying how well everything well.

Full results are on the SAL website and will be shortly on our website as well.

This was our last SAL match of the season: both Mary and I would like to thank everyone that competed, helped and supported the team during the season. It hasn't been the most successful SAL campaign for Serpentine, but fun was the same and was great to see that everyone tried their best and helped us fighting until the last match to stay in Div. 2: we are very proud of what we have done. So why not having a toast anyway? We are organising our T&F end of the season social on Wednesday 4th October (Location to be confirmed, but it will be after the club runs near Seymour): it will be great to see everyone there, so please put this date in your calendar.

Nick Barberis
SAL men's captain

Submitted: 23 August 2017

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